Surviving the day with a little miss no naps

I am going to hold my hand up and say I have always been coy about discussing my daughter’s sleep, because she was a great sleeper very early on, from about 8 weeks old she slept 7.30pm to 5 or 6am, most new parents do not want to know that your baby is a good sleeper and if you tell people with older children they often look at you with a look that says ‘it won’t last’. So I kept schtum and felt I couldn’t moan about anything, because my baby slept through - what did I have to moan about?!  

I ummed and ahhed about including the above paragraph as I am so afraid of people's feelings on sleep, but I have always been honest on here and I need to be able to be happy and honest when things go right as well as wrong. 

In the first few months Rose barely napped in the day so the days were long, but I couldn't complain as she slept all night, not every single night, but almost all of them, she was a dream sleeper for a newborn and it was completely unexpected. Having suffered a lot with pelvic pain during my pregnancy I started getting a lot more sleep once Rose arrived which I was not expecting! 

Fast forward to Rose being 6 months old and she started teething, and then caught another cold, and suddenly I met little miss no naps, no naps in the day and hours and hours of interrupted sleep, with screaming, tears, winging and refusals to be put down. Suddenly I was a zombie, shattered and tearful, I felt like the frayed end of an old rope. I couldn’t bare to see Rose so unsettled and unhappy when she had always been so happy and smiley.

I felt so tired I couldn’t see straight and started doubting my decisions; and I became focussed solely on getting Rose to get minutes of sleep. I cancelled seeing friends, didn’t want to drive and I started clock watching waiting for my husband to get home from work and help.

Why was this focus bad? Because it meant that I didn’t notice where we had lapsed in other ways, I didn’t notice small changes I had made to her routine, or her diet without thinking. They were all minor changes but I realised after a particularly bad night and a visit to the health visitor where she said ‘just try and keep everything through the bath and bed routine as calm as possible’ just how far I had strayed from the good old days of sleep and our previous routine. 

That one sentence from the health visitor made me stop and realise things were not remotely calm, I was tense and tired, Liam was doing his best to help but it made sense that Rose would pick up on the frazzled energy I was omitting.  I realised the reason Rose had been bad the night before wasn’t because of teething or a cold, both of which had started to ease off, it was probably a stomach ache, and the gripe water which I had given her in the early hours as a last resort was what had calmed things down. This had passed me by initially, just grateful for the 2 hours of sleep I had gotten after she had fallen back to sleep, after her waking up crying every half an hour from 11.30pm until 5.30am. 

I realised that in my tired state I had started using more food pouches (which are brilliant by the way) rather than food I was preparing myself and so was missing a few carb heavy ingredients I had always used as staples, so perhaps Rose wasn’t staying as full for as long. I was letting Rose watch TV, when usually I had a minimal tv rule,  if it meant she would calm down for 10 minutes whilst I tried to drink a cup of tea to get up the energy for bath-time. I realised to stay awake I was drinking more and more tea and less water, probably not ideal to drink that much caffeine when you are breastfeeding! Lastly, I wasn’t as strict on the timings of dinner, bath, milk and bed, I had started to stray from the timings and was letting things be more exciting than calm so the usual wind down wasn’t in place. 

All small things  that had gone unnoticed but adding up to being way off the base that would usually ease our beautiful daughter in to a sound sleep. 

I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Being tired and hoping every hour for minutes of sleep for both your baby and yourself means you focus only on getting through the day, I remember telling Liam that every day felt like I was running a marathon - subsequently he found a skipping rope in the fridge and started to realise perhaps I really wasn’t getting enough sleep! 

I realised that to get back to a place where we are all getting a decent amount of sleep, I needed to:

• Take a step back 
• Tackle the cold and the teething with whatever would help
• Think about what had helped Rose get a good nights sleep before 
• Ask for help

My mum came to help with Rose so that I could get some sleep during the day and I started waking Liam for help during the night, knowing that I couldn’t continue trying to do it all myself. Slowly but surely I felt much stronger and had more energy and Rose started to get over her cold and we enjoyed our time together again.

After a couple of days of longer stints of sleep through the night, having become very strict on everything that happens after 5pm, we hit the weekend, where the routine always becomes a bit haywire,  and we went back to more crying and wake ups (baby not me!). So perhaps there was some sort of correlation between the routine and sleep.

Sticking with the routine and making sure Rose got some decent naps during the day, either by going for a walk with the pushchair or lying down next to her for the nap, we had a night of more hours of uninterrupted sleep, the longest we had enjoyed in weeks. Hoping this is the start of more good nights, I daren't stray from the plan and am probably a bit fixated but will stick with it! 

I am conscious baby books are peppered with these regressions and there is no way more sleep will continue for long, and I should have a giant poster in the kitchen depicting a slippery slope so I don't fall down it so hard again, but hopefully I will spot the signs and won’t let myself get to the point of such limited sleep again as it was good for no one! 

Teething and colds / coughs definitely play a big part in making everything go haywire so here are a few products that I would recommend getting to help you through the day:

Calpol vapour plug in - put on when you put baby in the bath so it has already had time to circulate when you put them to bed 

Anbesol - teething gel that numbs the whole gum 

Gripe water - we didn’t use this much until recently but it has really helped since we started weaning Rose 

Vapour bubble bath - good if they have a really bad cold and is a bit of a pick me up for you all as the room smells like a spa! 

Dummies - I know they are not for everyone but they have really helped us with Rose, as a signal for sleep and to calm her down when she’s screaming so hard you can see her tonsils! 

Baby nurofen - effects seem to last a little longer than Calpol 

Food - buy in food that you can easily grab from the fridge or have someone make up for you the night before, when you're tired and the baby doesn't want to be put down it is hard to take care of yourself and this is when it is most important, you need to be able to reach in and grab something, whether it's a sandwich, sausage roll, babybel, donut, whatever, just make sure something is there. Personally, I have eaten my weight in toast these last few weeks. 

You can get most of these at the main supermarkets

A couple of other things I tried:

Less lights, more lamps - create as calming an environment as you can - I usually use the word boring instead of calming, so there is nothing to distract Rose

Swimming - always tires babies out so if you have the energy to get there it is worth a shot 

Walking - when they are this determined to be awake it needs to be a long walk and if you are really tired it is tough but maybe someone else could do the walk for you?

A comforter that only lives in the bed - bunny has come in to her own this last 3 weeks! We don't take her anywhere so we don't risk losing her and having largely ignored her until now Rose is suddenly very attached, holding on to her little ears as she falls asleep 

Baby bottle of water - I have one in the nursery so that if Rose gets really upset in the night I can use it to calm her down and soothe her throat, I still feed her if she wants milk but the water has definitely helped on a couple of occasions 

Reading - One night I read hundreds of poems from the 'book of a thousand poems', I was shattered and Rose didn't fall asleep but she calmed down to the point that I was able to lie back in bed and keep an eye on her through the monitor

This stint has lasted almost a month and I have no idea how people survive with babies that don't sleep for months on end, you are so strong to keep going when you must be so tired and I hope you all feel like you can ask for the help you need and aren't afraid to admit things are getting hard and you need a time out to take care of yourself. Too little sleep can be dangerous and it is vital we support mums who are having a tough time with their baby's sleep. 

If you have found something particularly works for you and your baby please share in the comments below to help other mummies, I've been overwhelmed by the supportive messages I have received from friends this last few weeks, they have really helped and made me feel like I'm not alone, when at times being at home with a baby can be incredibly lonely and you feel like nothing you do is right. 

Here's wishing you all a lovely nights sleep!!